I think it would probably kill God to give a direct answer to anything.
And it would probably kill me to hear the direct answer.
In this way God and I spare each other
the awkward conversation, with both our arms shaking
under this ashy rock that won’t fit through my door—
this thing he brought me because, drunk, I asked him to.
[This poem was originally published in the print journal Relief, Spring 2019]
https://www.reliefjournal.com/spring-2019
Natasha Oladokun is a Black, queer poet and essayist from Virginia. She earned a BA in English from the University of Virginia, and an MFA in creative writing from Hollins University. She holds fellowships from Cave Canem, The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Jackson Center for Creative Writing, Twelve Literary Arts, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the inaugural First Wave Poetry fellow. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, Image, Harvard Review Online, Kenyon Review Online, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and is working on her first collection of poems.
April 2022
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